My Wonderful Apprenticeship- A Minecraft Fanfic
by Blak
Summary: Mira just wants to live her dream- become an immortal superhuman who can punch down a tree and kill zombies with her bare hands. There's only one obstacle- she has no natural talent in the arts of power whatsoever. Oh, and there's a eight-foot black skeleton who leaves only death in his wake and can call upon the hordes of hell to do his bidding hunting her down.
1. Prologue

Heya.

Minecraft story. Things happening. Violence definitely. Swears occasionally. Sexy times not to be found.

I'm expecting putting a story up here to be like spitting into the ocean, as opposed to the MC forums where it's more like spitting into someone's cup, but we'll see. Any and all R&amp;R, even so harshly negative it's basically hate, is appreciated as long as it's explained.

Prologue.

_In the beginning, there was nothing._

_There was no light, no life, no land and no law._

_And then there was the Jhavoor._

"Where iss sshe?" The kick that struck Acklan in the stomach was strong enough to crack rock, and made with a shin of bare bone. He was sent skidding backwards across the rain-slick dirt road and hit the bank with a resounding _thwap_ of oiled leather hitting mud. "Where the hell iss sshe?" He was picked up by the collar of his coat and slammed repeatedly into a tree before being effortlessly held a good half-metre off the ground.

He coughed violently. "I don't know! I don't know who you're…"

"Wrong ansswer!"

He went sailing through the air before landing with a grating skid on the ground. He coughed again and winced with the action- he had felt some of his old ribs crack with that impact. He heard his horse Duncan whinnying in terror at the apparition that was throwing him around like a bag of old sticks, and below Duncan's horrified screams the _hiss_ as rain steamed where it struck the apparition's scalding hot drum-taught skin.

"Sshut UP!"

Acklan turned himself over, half-slipping in the mud. The creature, whatever it was, was advancing on Duncan, sword raised. The horse thrashed and kicked, but it couldn't escape the cart it was pulling, and it couldn't pull the cart itself on account of the broken, blazing wheel that the monster had broken as it first appeared.

"Ssilence!" the terrible black sword came up in a swoop, trailing grey fire. It cut through the horse's neck without slowing and went on to bifurcate a significant portion of its skull. The severed part fell to the floor with a thud and a hiss.

And then the desiccation started.

The grey fire spread across the horse's body. Where it touched the gelding's hide the fur blackened and dried, tightening across Duncan's former skeleton. After maybe seven seconds the horse had withered away to some horrible aberration of sloughing skin and gleaming black bone.

Then, with a creak, it fell into pieces, collapsing into a pile of burnt hide and broken bones.

The creature turned its gaze on him and began striding towards him, its oversized limbs bringing it across the intervening distance disturbingly quickly. He panicked, scrabbling backwards through the mud.

Not fast enough.

The creature reached down and took him by the neck in one bony hand. It lifted him up again so that his feet dangled in the air and they were at each other's eye level…

Should have been at each others eye level.

Instead of eyeballs the creature had bleak, empty sockets. There was nothing in those eyes, not even the white of bone like you'd find in the eyes of a skeleton- there was nothing but absolute, total darkness.

The wither skeleton opened its mouth, skin already pulled tight over its oversized skull somehow finding room to stretch further. It opened its fanged, tongueless mouth, and against all laws of nature spoke to him again.

"Where. Iss. Sshe?"

From somewhere, Acklan realised he had drawn a tiny last bit of courage. He spat at the creatures face, and it was a good spit, with the perfect power and aim and everything.

"Fuck. You. Monster."

The wither skeleton sighed, and the last thing Acklan felt before the withering began was the cut of its blade biting into his neck.


	2. Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE.

_And the Jhavoor drew things from outside all things._

_And the chipped one appeared._

_And from it he made gods._

_Fig 12.1, The 'Serpit Reicio', the common or garden Creeper, is renowned as being amongst the most dangerous of the gods' creations. _

"Uh-huh."

_Weighing in at an around ninety kilograms for a fully matured female of breeding age, Creepers make their homes in dark caves and…_

"Uh-huh."

_…deep forests their body …forty percent explosives with a higher effective payload than five…_

"Uh-huh."

_… not tnt… non-volatile… dangerous… male to female… counter-insemination… proboscis jaw… monochrome vision… scales comparab… leather…_

"Uh… hm."

She was skipping words involuntarily again, well that was a good a sign as any that her always limited pool of attention was running dry.

Mira sighed, closed her book, and stowed it back in her pack. She stopped leaning on the tree and, still sitting cross-legged held a hand out beyond its boughs to check how badly it was raining. It came back with the sleeve of her cotton smock sticking to her arm, drenched through.

She sighed again and sat back against the tree. Rain was never nice, and she still had some kilometres to go in her journey. It had taken a few months so far, and she was running out of food and money from her pack.

She took inventory again.

_Two (2) shirts, white and blue, cotton, slightly foxed._

_One (1) pair of leggings, brown, in good repair._

_One (1) book, "All the beasts of the gods", severely battered._

_Thirty-five (35) red triangle dollars, the remains of five hundred._

_Two (2) slices of pumpkin pie, one half-eaten._

Not a lot. Not enough to get her back to her home at any rate. He prospective master had better take her in, or…

Or she'd find a way. That's what her mother had always said. Find a way.

Of course, she didn't say it anymore. She didn't say anything anymore, thank god.

They'd burned her pretty thoroughly.

There was a rapid crunching of grass nearby, and she looked to see a spider barrelling across the plains, looking for shelter from the rain. It was… terrible. Horrible. As long as a man was tall, and just as wide rom the tips of its legs to each other. Its entire abdomen and skull were covered in fine black fur that contrasted strongly with its shining chitinous black legs, its eight blood-red eyes and its gleaming white fangs.

She waved to it to beckon it over and it came, scuttling towards her with all of its considerable speed. It took shelter beside her, soaked to the bone, looking thoroughly dejected.

"aw, look at you!" Mira chirped. "Like a drowned rat." She removed one of her shirts from the bag and proceeded to use it to dry the poor arachnid off. "I'll never understand why people are afraid of you lot, you've never done me any harm. At least you don't have VMH, hey?" she laughed, finished drying the spider, and brushed the few bits of hair it had lost off her shirt. "There, all nice and dry."

The spider made a small, gravelly noise.

"Well, I'm sure I don't know what that meant, but I choose to believe it was thanks." She sat back against the tree as the spider nuzzled into her waist, such as it was, as something poked into her other side. She turned, and there was a much smaller spider doing the same as the larger one, although it was still soaked through. There were another four behind it.

"Aww, you have babies, hey?" she smiled and took up her shirt, whiling away the storm drying baby spiders.

And a fair dozen kilometres away a horse lost its head.

/

It's pitch black here. There is no light, none at all. Daylight was left some hundred metres above here. Torchlight went around three caverns ago. It. Is. Pitch. Black.

But this man still moves as if he can see. To him it must be as twilight at worst. All six foot nothing of him moves with confidence, there is no feeling for the wall his pick strikes, and his footing is as sure a can be.

Which is odd.

What's more odd is what happens when the pick hits the rock of the wall. It doesn't chip away at it like a normal miner. Instead the iron spike is driven into the stone until rock wall hits wooden handle, and then the entire thing is wrenched out, tearing an enormous chunk of stone with it.

The miner pauses and brushes away some stone dust. Below is something crumbling and black that turns to powder in his fingers.

"Thank the five." Rings out across the cave, neatly masking the light footsteps of something utterly inhuman behind him.

/

Mira opened her eyes.

It had stopped raining. Or at least it was stopping. She'd fallen asleep for a period of time she couldn't hope to guess at, but certainly long enough to let the spider wander of, uninterested.

Alone again. It had been a lonely journey. Well, start as you mean to go on. She stood up, dusted off her caboose, and left the shelter of the tree.

As she set off, so close to her destination now, she smiled. Most people would have said an eleven year old girl couldn't make it this far alone, couldn't travel for three months on and off road with only what she could carry. Her father had definitely thought that- he'd been quite emphatic about it in fact. He'd said that the only way she was going to find Kahl was if the white-eyed king took her himself.

He'd said it was suicide

She'd given him a look that was far too old for someone not even in their teens and told him "that's the point."

The grass crunched wetly under her feet as she walked, stepping around the cowpats and the aimless creatures that had created them. She stopped and picked a daisy, working it into her blonde hair as she walked. It was pretty here on the plains- the grasslands stretched for kilometres in every direction until they met the neighbouring biomes. She couldn't quite see what was in the east, as it was obscured by some lowlying hills, but in the north ahead of her there were some of the biggest mountains she'd ever seen, hulking great masses of grey stone that speared high into the sky. On her left the plains gave way far in the distance to an icy tundra, and behind her was the birch forest she'd come from, the one that the road wound through the middle of.

She stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. Yes, it was nice here. Better than the land around the cities, where there was all that smog and quarries were dug into the-

There. Noise. Look.

She turned, quickly. There was a large pit on her right, the type she'd grown so used to she didn't even see them anymore. There was a zombie in it, hiding just inside the shade provided by the overhanging rock. It was badly decayed- there was only one eye left, and it was the milky-white that eyes went when their owner stopped blinking and the scratches started to accumulate. Patches of bloody rib were showing through the tattered remains of its shirt and its skin was missing in other places too, most notably the crown of its skull which was a gleaming bone-white. Its jaw was held on by only one side's ligaments. It moaned at her again, hungry and angry but too afraid of the sun to leave the cave.

Mira reached down, picked up a stone, tested its weight, and threw it overarm at the zombie's head. It bounced off its skull with a _clack_.

"Go back to your hell, monster!"

She turned and sprinted off north again. These plain were pretty, but they certainly not safe.

But at least they were above ground.


	3. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO.

_And He looked upon the first._

_"You shall be light." He decreed._

_"You shall seek to illuminate."_

It was still dark in the cave.

And then it wasn't.

Orange light, weak when compared to almost any other source but in comparison to the eternity of pitch-darkness here almost incomparably blinding, flared out from a torch in the wall.

The man who had lit it turned away from the rockface. He was slightly above average height- six foot, maybe six foot one at the outside- with matted black hair streaked with grey that reached down to his shoulders as well as a beard that had evidently been, like the hair, cut with shears. He wore mottled mid-thigh length grey robes, well-washed but fraying at the edges, especially around the rim of the hood that was currently cast back onto his shoulders.

As for his face… his most starling feature was his lack of them, specifically his lack of a right eye and a small but noticeable part of the bridge of his nose. The other eye was very wide, but in this case it was with surprise.

Because he was looking at a Creeper.

Six feet tall and two wide, covered in leathery green scales and without a discernible torso, just a central pillar of muscle and ribs supporting a head without a jaw. Four legs arranged splayed at its base, each one tipped with an enormous claw of polished bone that rested impossibly lightly on the stone floor. Its face was perhaps the worst part of the whole disgusting pile- two sockets without eyes, just tiny red stalks, and a toothless cavity below them that was in every way an awful parody of a grimacing mouth.

It was moments like this when everything you knew, everything you _were_, came down to one action.

_A punch to the throat confuses and chokes a Creeper for a fraction of a second._

_A slug to the midsection will, if placed correctly, disrupt its detonator sack._

_A two-handed, open-palmed impact on the upper body will send it skittering backwards._

The three blows came in such quick succession that by the time the Creeper's sluggish reptilian mind acknowledged the first hit it was already in a body that was sailing backwards across the cavern. It hissed, twisting in midair so that its bone-claws hit the wall behind it first. Its legs bent like leaf springs, compressing the Creeper's strength for a fraction of a second before it shot back at the man, glowing white as it primed its first and final detonation. The man would die, his body would be scattered in bloody chunks, and the Creeper's children would eat of his…

He had a bow. Where did he get a bow?

_Ducking an airborne Creeper's lunge will avoid it._

_A well timed arrow through the mouth will incapacitate it._

_A punch II bow will send a Creeper well out of blast range._

The Creeper flew diagonally upwards, pulled along against every law of nature by the arrow itself. It continued like this until it reached the furthest upper corner of the cavern from its target.

At this point it realised, terrified, that it was far, far too late to abort its detonation.

The man averted his eyes as the cave was lit by the blinding light of the Creeper's explosion, and kept them turned away as stone dust sleeted past him. Lumps of rock fell to the uneven floor, and the shockwave blew the torch's flame away, bringing the dark once again.

"Gods, I hate those."

The man turned back to the torch and cupped his hands around the lump of coal at its head. Words were muttered more to the effect of "sodding torches" than anything specifically mystical, and his hands turned dull red as light tried to force its way out through his fingers.

"There, that should do-"

There was a stabbing pain in the back of his scalp for the barest instant before the pain continued in a laser-straight line through his skull and out through his right eyesocket. There was a wet feeling across his right cheek, and he felt the hot iron smell of blood surge up his nose. His faced creased up with a wince.

"Ow."

He turned to see a vision in green and blue leap from the crater the Creeper had made high up the wall and come sprinting towards him as fast as its decomposed legs would allow, accompanied by two who fitted a similar description. Each one was a dead human in the old turquoise clothes of The Before, and each one was certainly pumped up to their decomposed eyeballs with VMH. Here, this far from the surface, they'd passed gods only knew how many years without ever seeing sun, and as such were of a very high calibre when it came to the undead.

The first took the haft of his pick to the face and stumbled away, face pulverised and leaking brain. The miner ducked under the second zombie's outstretched arms and brought the tip of his pick up in a sweep that sent it into the undead's armpit, through its leathery skin and into whatever vital organs it still had in there.

Where it stuck.

At this point an idiot would have struggled with the pick, trying to remove it before he third zombie arrived. If… _when _they failed they'd be looking at a bite, maybe more than one. Even if Landstriders were immune to VMH, that was an unappetizing prospect.

Instead, the man swept his foot out. The zombie tripped and fell, putting its skull in the perfect place for his boot. Its head burst like a melon beneath his sole.

He stopped to take stock of the area for a moment. The first zombie was in the corner of the cavern- it had stumbled blindly for a while before the critical parts of its brain had finally given up. The third was dead. Very dead. The second continue squirming until he put one hand on the handle of the pick, one foot on the zombie's chest, and _heaved._

That only left the…

An arrow whistled over his left shoulder, cutting a light scratch through the cloth.

…skeleton.

He threw himself into a roll to dodge the next inevitable arrow, and it clattered into the stone floor in front of him. He turned to face the bony archer high up in the cave's wall.

"Oh, get lost." He reached into his empty eyesocket, felt around for the flint tip of the arrow he knew was in there. He found it and drew it out, wincing as he did so. It came free with an extended _shlup_, a small trickle of brain, and a large spout of blood.

More arrows came at him as he notched it calmly in his bow. He dodged them with the smallest of movements, jerking his head or torso slightly to the left or right.

The arrow sailed from the bow and through the skeleton's torso. Its bones fractured around it, and it fell into fragments.

The miner turned and left.

/

The house was…

Underwhelming.

Mira's mother had raised her like her brothers before her, with surprisingly few distinctions. There had been a few… _different_ talks on a few subjects, but mostly she'd had their upbringing, and all the dirt and fighting that came with it.

And that had included the stories of the Landstriders.

Monseye and Esilw, the fools with the army of armies at their back. Ozone, and the gold that smeared like soap. The mischievous and deadly Thunder of the Adecision who spread chaos in his wake like a fiery cape. They and lesser ones of their kind were renowned for their skills at construction- vast, impossible edifices that reached into the sky with fingers of gold and diamond. Structures so massive and impressive that entire cities sprung up around them when their original occupants had moved on.

This… was not that. Not even close.

It wasn't bad. In fact, it was quite nice. A small wooden lodge built into the side of a small cliff. There was only one floor, but a steeply peaked roof that hinted at a large attic. Its windows were relatively small, but it seemed bright enough inside with the shutters open as they were. It was south-facing, and nicely caught the sun on what lawn it had between a small pasture of various animals and what looked like an efficient melon farm. Wheat grew in strict rows beyond the rest of the agricultural space, and beyond them…

Mira walked over to them, skipping every third step. She had no idea what they were. Brown seed pods hanging from trees she didn't recognise in the slightest. They were round and-

Footsteps.

To the right of the house there was a small stone hut, sloped at its back. She hadn't looked into it yet, but there were footsteps leaking from between its closed doors. Considerably more footsteps than such a small building would warrant.

She crouched behind the strange tree, peering between its low-lying leaves at the doors. This could be Kahl, or it could be literally anyone else. A zombie, perhaps, or even another Landstrider. She knew they fought at times; Pervurpa her mother's stories had called it. Ambushes and traps and blows that could shatter rock being taken like it was nothing. That was not something she wanted to be caught in the middle of.

The door opened, and her breath caught in her throat. The person that stepped through was bedraggled in the extreme, with most of his face and upper robes caked in half-dried blood. His step was slightly staggered, and as he closed the door he stopped moving for a brief moment, swaying slightly as he caught his balance. He took a deep breath, coughed, and made his way over to the house. His hand paused on the doorknob.

"Why?" He asked, speaking seemingly to the door "Are you hiding behind my tree?"

There as a long silence.

"Your tree, hey?" Mira stood up carefully, ready to bolt at any moment. "So this is your house. Are you Kahl, hey?"

The man nodded. "A house I don't recall inviting you to." He turned around and she hid behind the tree again before he saw her. "Hang on, are you from that village?"

She nodded before she realised he couldn't see that. "Yeah, I was…"

"The smith's daughter."

"Yep." She gulped. "You told me you were looking for an apprentice. You _are_ Kahl, hey?"

"I did?" He scratched his head. Blood flakes fell like dandruff.

"Uh-huh." She stepped out from behind the tree. "You said you would teach anyone with the skill, and I know how to smelt, and cast, and mine, and I can carry a lot and I don't eat much and spiders and creepers and silverfish don't give me problems andIdon'tscareeasilyandIreallreallyreallywanttobeaLandstriderlikeyouandpleasetakemeon…" She took a second to breathe. "Please?"

The man looked at her. Short, round-faced, blonde hair cut at her ears, big brown eyes, no more than twelve years old. Stronger than she first appeared too- you could tell by the way the sleeves hung around the bicep. Small burn scar in the palm of her left hand. Green cotton smock, grubby and frayed but often patched. Big brown leather boots.

Grew up with brothers, spent most of her life keeping up with them. Enjoys rough games, she certainly must play them enough. Curious nature too, even when it's to her detriment.

And she was smart enough and dedicated enough to find him.

"It's not as simple as wanting to be one of… what I am." He said. "You have to really work hard for it."

She nodded. "I know. I will."

"And you have to have a dream…"

"Of course I had a dream. Otherwise I wouldn't be here!"

He looked up at the sun, and didn't have far to look. It was big and turned the sky blood-red on the horizon.

"The sun's setting. You can stay the night at least. I'll make my decision in the morning." He turned and opened the door. "If I do decide to give you a try, that won't be the end of it. There will be tests. They will be hard. You are not even close to in the clear yet." He stepped through. "And yes, I am Kahl. Remember it."

The girl shrugged. "Good enough"

The sun set on what Mira hoped to be the last day of her old life.

And, in a sense, it was.

But there are dreams and there are _dreams._


	4. Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

_And He looked upon the second._

"_You shall be Land." He said._

"_You shall seek to create."_

The next morning, as every morning since Light returned to the First Man, the sun rose across the world.

In every place it rose in the same instant. Be there a difference of a meter or a billion, the sun lit the world and burned away the creatures of the night everywhere at once.

Almost immediately after the first light touched Kahl's stone shed he was out of its doors, rotating a shoulder that seemed to have taken a sizable sword strike around the collarbone area, but that was already closing up.

"Good morning, world." He groaned. "What surprises do you have for me today?"

He'd spent the night in the mines. He didn't get tired, although he was of course capable of sleep. His bed had been occupied by his guest, and he hadn't felt like spending the few minutes it would take to build a new room.

"Sugar?" He looked down. The girl, the one from yesterday… Mira… was standing in front of him with both arms wrapped around a bushel of canes. "They looked over a meter tall, which my dad always said was when you should cut them, so I cut them down with a machete I found in your box!" she shifted her grip on them to one arm. "Here." She passed him the machete.

Blade first.

"Don't bother testing me, girl." He reached down and took it with his left hand, fingers closing around the sharp edge. As he stood up the machete vanished from his hand. He held it open- fingers splayed. "I'll pass." There were no cuts.

Mira's eyes were wide. "So, it's true you can do that. Will I be able to?"

He shrugged, extending his right arm. "Perhaps, it's simple enough." The machete appeared in his extended hand. "But for now, we'll be focusing on the tests." He turned and pointed at a box by the door. "Put the canes in there, then meet me on the top of the cliff behind the house."

Mira followed his instructions to the letter. By the time she reached him there was a pit exactly three metes cubed dug into the ground of the clifftop. Kahl was crouched at the bottom of the hole, passing his hand over the loose soil. The fragments of dirt vanished as his open palm passed them.

"Absorption." He said, without looking up at her. "Same principle as with the machete. Well, in a sense at least." He stood up and held out a hand. She took it and he helped her down.

"What's that for?" _That_ was a piece of white cloth held at eye-height on the side of the pit. It was clearly draped around something flush to the edge of the hole- a painting perhaps, or a sign.

"That is for the test of light, which is what you're about to do." Kahl walked to the corner and crouched, hand to the floor. The earth beneath him rumbled, and he slowly rose back up to ground level on a pillar of dirt. "I'm going to block all the light out of this pit. Once I have, remove the sheet and tell me what the sign beneath it says."

Mira nodded. "Okay, will do."

Kahl made eight quick motions with his right hand, and everything went dark. Pitch black. No light at all.

Mira turned, and felt for where she remembered the cloth was. After a short fumble, it was in her hands, and then it was on the floor in an invisible heap. She peered at the space she assumed was behind it.

She couldn't read anything.

She couldn't even _see_ anything. The absence of any kind of light in the pit turned everything into the same featureless blackness. She could see nothing because there was nothing to see _by_.

Ten minutes passed. Mira sat with her eyes closed, attempting to adjust her night vision. It didn't get her anywhere. She tried again.

Still nothing. And now even more time had passed.

"What's it say?" Kahl's voice was muffled almost to imperceptibility by the metre of soil between them.

She sighed in the total darkness "I… I don't know."

There was a silence. "Do you want some more time?"

"Would it help?"

Another silence. "Probably not."

"Then no thank you."

"Alright." There was a _krump,_ and light flooded into the pit, illuminating where Kahl's arm had punched clean through a meter of dirt. The soil around it vanished into wherever the absorption ability put things, and he hauled her out by her hand. "Up you come, girl."

She dusted herself off. "So are we done with that test now?"

"I'll have to fill in the pit later to stop anything nasty popping up in it, but yeah." Kahl crouched down to look the girl in the eye. "So, how do you think it went?"

Mira looked at the floor and kicked her feet idly, a habit that came up whenever she knew he was going to get scolded. "Not great."

"No. Not great at all. Could you really not see anything in there, girl?" She shook her head. Kahl sighed. "Come on then. Next test. Land."

/

Sister Skani looked into the pit. The power that was coming, it had to come from somewhere. Who-

"_I sought, and I found!"_

"_You found a grave! "_

"_I am the one truth left now. None can hold me!"_

"_The creeper king is come!"_

"_All your resistance, all your strength… It's NOTHING!"_

"_Terawatt… cannon!"_

"_Welcome to the End of the universe."_

"_You're wrong, it's the one you'll die in!"_

"_THE. CORRUPTION. CREEPS."_

She screamed.

/

"Land is simple." Kahl explained. "Lady Land gives us but one of our skills. Light lets us see in the dark and manipulate redstone. Law gives us matter levitation and, if we're exceptionally devoted to the cause, flight. Life gives resilience and regeneration. Land, though…" He patted the stone block he was sat on. "Strength. Strength and nothing but." They were back in front of the house, on the closest side of the expanse of grassland that started beyond the animal pens and went on until it hit the next biome. "Strength enough to kill a cow bare-handed, to punch through a wall, and certainly enough to lift this block." He hopped off it and stood to the side.

"You… you think I can…" Mira stammered, daunted. "How much does it weigh?"

"Getting on for three tons. But I don't expect you to lift it. Just move it a little."

Mira grit her teeth. _I can do this. I know I can. People have been passing these tests for… forever!_

/

By the time the other sisters reached Skani she'd stopped her screaming. Now she'd passed through fear and into a quite plateau of lucid terror.

"Skani." One asked. "Are you hurt? Is everything alright?"

Skani picked her word very carefully. "Yes. For now, all is well."

/

Kahl gently turned over Mira's wrist, noting the way the flesh lumped in odd places. "I've never see a series of bone fractures quite like these before."

"It's… nothing… I'm fine…"

The Landstrider raised his sole remaining eyebrow. "It's broken in three different places, and the fingers are a mess. Although I admire the stoicism, it really isn't necessary." He laid the arm carefully down on the table. They were inside the house now, in the one large wood panelled room that dominated the majority of the internal floorspace. Night was falling outside, and he had lit the hearth fire to light the room and keep his guest warm.

Not, it seemed, that she'd be saying for long.

"I need you to keep it still." Kahl got to his feet. "I'll be back in a minute."

Mira lightly prodded her am, and winced at the result. It hurt like nothing she'd ever felt before, worse even than when she'd burnt herself picking up a coal from the forge as a baby. That had been… sore. Really really sore. But this was worse. It was a stabbing kind of pain, mixed in with an acute ache. She'd really done a number on herself.

She sighed. Welp, that was it. Three months of travelling, all her possessions pawned to pay for food and passage, and for what? To break her arm on a… a goddam rock! She couldn't even pass the tests. Two tests failed out of two…

Wait. Life gave resilience. She wasn't resilient at all. Three tests failed. Out of two.

She could feel herself starting to cry, but she bit the impulse back. She hadn't cried in years, she wasn't going to start now.

Blinking repeatedly to keep the treacherous drops of saltwater back, she realised that it was going to be her last night not on the road home. Back to the smithy and a life that would be mostly just minding the forge until she had her first child in a couple of years, and then just killing time until time killed her.

So much for dreams, eh?

It wasn't a bad place for your greatest aspirations to curl up and die in, on reflection. Entirely oak apart from the windows and around the hearth in the back wall. The left hand side as you came in through the door opposite the fireplace was for sitting in, with the huge woollen cubes that were proverbially what landstriders relaxed on scattered around, as well as the bed she had slept in the previous night. There was also a small table that could seat two at a pinch and she had had her lunch at, which had been the last slice of pumpkin pie that she'd brought with her since she didn't like the idea of taking Kahl's food. Currently she had her arm resting on it.

The opposite side of the room- the right hand side- was all work. A row of ovens that pulled double duty as heavy-grade furnaces were arranged along the rightmost wall, double-stacked on top of each other. Some smouldered away, smelting iron ore into metal, and one was cooking fish for dinner, she knew. The rest were sat idle, cold. Apart from the furnaces, all that side of the room held was an iron barrel of water, an anvil, and a workbench, both of which were currently unused.

The rear of the room housed, along with the hearth, a ladder up which Kahl had left a few moments ago. He came back holding a glass bottle filled with a red liquid that glowed strangely under the firelight.

"Here. A potion of healing. It should be able to patch you back together."

Mira thanked him and took the potion, downing the entire thing in one go. There was a stabbing pain from her arm, but she managed to keep her only reaction to it a wince as her bones started to move under her skin, redistributing and re-fusing themselves to how they should have been

Kahl sat at the table opposite her. He leaned forwards, resting on his elbows. He looked decidedly uneasy. "So… how do you think today went?"

Mira couldn't meet his gaze. "Not… well. Awfully."

"Awfully is the word I would use. I admire your dedication and resolve, and I'll admit that it's normally those traits that cause the Dream." Kahl sighed. "I don't understand it, really. After the Last appears in your sleep-"

"The who?" Mira was looking at him now, quizzically.

"The Last. The fifth god. Light Land Life Law Last, it's domain is th-" he saw Mira's face had gone blank. "You never had the Dream, did you?"

"Of course I had a dream, otherwise I wouldn't be here!" she was angry now. She wasn't sure what at, but she was angry.

"Not a dream, the Dream. Capital D. the appearance of the Last and…" Realisation hit him like a sack of bricks. "You meant an aspiration when I asked before, didn't you?" Mira nodded, quietly seething. "It doesn't work like that. It's a factor, but…"

"But I have to be picked by some half-existent abstract… _thing_ that I've never heard of if I want to be part of the super-secret club! That's… that's…" She yelled out and buried her head in her hands. "What do I have to do? Is there anything I _can_ do? Tell Me What To DO!"

"You have to have a drive, and you have to be worthy. I'm sorry but it's not my decision."

"I… I have no worth?" Mira was properly crying now, but they were angry tears. She had never been so furious in her life. She wanted to lash out, to hurt someone, kill something. The anger was building up something fierce, effectively percolating out of her into the air. Kahl could feel it, essence of rage to an intensity he had rarely seen before.

"I didn't say that. You're smart, you're determined, and you have your life ahead of you." He reached forward and tilted her head up to look at him. "When you have the Dream, come back here. I'll teach you everything I know, alright?" the mist of anger around her started to fade away. "But until then, you have to go home. It's too dangerous here. Around me. You can stay the night, but tomorrow you need to go home."

/

Radel had taken over Skani's watch. There weren't many sisters strong enough to see into the void directly, and they were lucky to have a second on hand to take over down here in the lower levels.

_The Jhavoor coiled through the void, black on black, invisible to the untrained eye. A lazily snaking coil of…_

_Spiking, jagged blue lines, cracking like lightning. Coiling and twisting and…_

Radel screamed.


	5. Chapter 4

Yeah, this took a while. Sorry.

CHAPTER THREE

_And He looked upon the third._

_"You shall be Life." He said._

_"You shall seek to populate."_

So. First back to the road. That was, what, an hour's walk?

Then follow that to the main road. Then head along _that _until you reach Pythir. From there, get a boat across the Grey Lake, and find a cart on the other side, and then…

Mira sighed inwardly. It was just a big chain of tasks wasn't it? And at the end of it was a home she didn't want to return to. Her dad was going to be livid, and all her brothers and friends would tease her for days, and then it would be her wedding, and she'd be getting married to… Amol, most likely. And then it was motherhood.

The worst part was that none of that was truly _bad._ She liked Amol, she really did. Being a smith was a pleasant enough life, and she had no doubt that she would love whatever kids they had together…

But it was all so _normal._ Average. Run-of-the-mill. Mira didn't know the word "pedestrian", but it was perfect to describe her thoughts on the subject. She'd brushed her fingers on the edge of a world that was so far beyond her experiences or those of anyone she knew that it was kind of intimidating. A world where fear, or at least true dread, didn't exist. Where the ability to do anything at all lay in reach.

And now it was gone.

She felt herself fuming.

/

_The rage came back, not as strong as before, far from powerful enough to morph the Jhavoor, to scare the sisterhood, but it was there._

_Rotten snouts sniffed the air, and the scent of anger flew through their nostrils like a razor through water._

_And this time… this time the scent stayed._

_/_

Kahl spent some time staring at the wall.

Then he went to his chest, removed a piece of pork, and cooked it on a stove.

Then he sat down and ate the pork, resuming his staring at the wall.

He chewed each mouthful thoroughly, thoughtfully, as his expression glazed over. Occasionally he would open his mouth, as if to speak to the empty room, but thought better of it.

Eventually he finished the chop. He didn't move from his seat, and his gaze did not falter.

"It wasn't safe, she couldn't stay."

The room offered no response.

"I've made do by myself for… for a long time. This doesn't change anything."

This time the room offered a heavy abundance of absolutely nothing.

Eventually he got up and left.

The fire settled a little. But that was it.

Eventually it started raining.

/

"Stupid rain. Stupid tests. Stupid, stupid stupid."

Mira skidded down a dirt bank, turned to slick mud from the rain. The motion was a practiced one, and she hit the bottom perfectly without hitting _her_ bottom, and carried on walking.

"Stupid stories. Stupid Kahl."

The seemingly omnipresent birch trees gave way to a narrow road. Uncovered dirt, rutted by footfalls and the occasional cart. She turned right and followed it.

"Stupid Last. Stupid dreams."

The rain plastered her hair to her head, beaded in her lashes and stuck her smock to her skin, but she was far too self-absorbed to notice the cold and the damp.

"Stupid me."

She was almost too self-absorbed to notice the hoofbeats.

The horse barrelled past her. A grey mare, probably a draft horse, with her eyes set firmly on the distant horizon and her legs pumping with all the strength she could muster. Mira ignored it. It was a wild creature, spooked by a spider or…

It had a saddle.

She turned. The east-west section of road she was on curved south further down the track until the forest obscured it- the opposite way to the way she was going, and away from Kahl's lodge. She hadn't thought to look down that way at all. There was a man running along the road there, middle-aged, in good shape, greying hair, a farmer most likely, he was certainly dressed like one.

"Excuse me, what are you running from, hey?" He passed her without a word or even a glance in her direction, still sprinting with everything he had. He didn't even scream, he was saving his breath for running. "Excuse m-"

He was only about two dozen metres past her when it happened.

The bushes on the far side of the road burst open, and some… _thing_ pink and green and gleaming white leapt from their leafy masses. It cleared the entire road in a single bound, and hit the man square in the side. He started scrabbling for a few brief, precious moments and then…

There were jaws. There was a throat. There was a brief flurry of movement on the part of the farmer, and then he stopped moving forever.

More creatures like the first appeared from the trees. They shambled hesitantly as they left the shade of the leaves, seemingly afraid of the open air, but emerged nonetheless. They were great hulking brutes of creatures- a man's height and rough shape, but maybe half again as broad, with thick pink skin that was hairy in some places, decaying in others, and filthy in all. In some places the skin was rotten through to the diseased green meat beneath, and in others the rot had gone right through to the bone, which gleamed white in the raincloud-filtered sunlight. They wore only brown hessian loincloths, held on with belts of rope that mercifully protected their dignity. Their teeth were an assortment, but the most obvious ones were their enormous canines that jutted from their lower jaws like tusks in faces that were mostly snout. Each of them seemed to have only one possession, a golden sword, chained to their arms by thick iron links to stop them from dropping it. It was probably just as well, as many of the blades bounced along the ground, dragged along by the chains as they fell from hands that had long since forgotten them.

Zombie pigmen.

Mira froze on the spot. She knew about the pigmen, everybody did. Of course, most of what she knew was conflicting- they burned in sunlight, but they were immune to fire, they were soulless demons from the darkest pits of the nether, they were the souls of disobedient children, they were the souls of pigs, they ate human flesh, they ate grass, they ate darkness itself, they walked the earth during the full moon, they walked the earth only when a wizard called them forth- but there was one fact that transcended all tales. They wouldn't attack until they were provoked or frightened.

So she stood perfectly still. More of them emerged, some from the way she'd come, some ahead of her, some more evidently behind her- which was now where the farmer had come from- from what she could hear. They snuffled and screeched at random intervals and stank of rotten meat, the sounds and smells approaching something akin to a solid wall as the horde emerged. There were a lot of them, maybe forty, and each one was easily capable of killing her alone- they were bigger than her, stronger than her, and she wasn't even armed.

But until something startled them she would be…

"You worthless foolss!"

She turned, breaking her dedication to immobility to see who or what this newcomer was. Surely enough, standing in the road in the direction the farmer had come from, barely twenty metres away, was…

Oh, by he who wrought all, how was THAT walking the earth?

Nine foot of blackened flesh, stretched taught over an oversized frame, bones clearly visible beneath the thin skin. A dozen stubby horns jutting haphazardly from its hairless skull, and a mouthful of fangs that grew not from gums, but straight from the bone itself. The air around it shimmered, caught in a heat haze from the sheer temperature of the thing. Rain droplets sizzled like spit on a stove as they hit the creature's body and the ground charred under its feet. In its hand it held a sword of stone half as long again as her arm that burned with a deep grey flame, ridiculously oversized for a human to wield single-handed but an easy enough job for the black giant.

While the pigmen were brute strength and animalistic ferocity, the wither skeleton was none of these things. He stood perfectly still, the stillness of the dead, but appeared as if ready to leap into whip-fast motion at the first opportunity. Somehow, that was much worse.

His arm snapped up, claw-like fingers pointing directly at the space between Mira's eyes as if he could cause some baleful force to lap across the gap. His eyes flashed phosphor-white, and he spoke in a new voice that rumbled like thunder in the mountains and made Mira feel sick to the base of her guts.

"Get. Her."

She ran for the far side of the road whilst the pigmen stood screeching, and she'd just reached the tree when the first sounds of heavy footfalls told her they' started their pursuit.

/

Kahl's pick rose and fell. The sound of it striking stone was the only thing to break the silence of the cavern. It was a practiced motion, a regular one, but nonetheless it increased rapidly in tempo as he worked. The regular _chik… chik… _of the pick sped up hugely until what was a strike per second became a flurry of iron on stone. Rock dissolved beneath the tip of his pick, going from wall to pebbles instantly under its touch.

_Right decision right decision right decision RIGHT DECISION!_

He saw a zombie in his peripheral vision. He spun, the pick went clean through its skull, vaporised its frontal cortices, and struck the wall again. It was just an extended mining swing in most ways the term could be applied.

_Right decision right decision…_

/

Mira was still running. She'd lost sight of the road a fair ways back, and was just sprinting to live now- she had no destination, and no idea of how she could gain one as things stood. The trees successfully blocked the sun enough for her to be unable to judge its position, and she'd turned too many times to be able to know which way she was even going.

The screeching behind her drew closer, and she put everything she had into another burst of speed. A dense thicket of trees loomed ahead and she used her small size to duck between some branches and lose her pursuers for a brief moment. She lost another scrap of sleeve to the branches as she squeezed between two beams, pigmen snapping at her heels, but she'd gained an advantage for a little while.

Her first instinct had been to double back to Kahl, but that had crashed and burned when the pigmen cut her off. There were a lot of them, and they were extremely fast individually. What was worse was their co-ordination, their primal pack instincts. They seemed to be able to anticipate where she'd head before she arrived, and were heading her off at every opportunity. A double-back turned into a diversion turned into a circumnavigation turned into being totally lost. She was probably travelling east now, but she might have been...

Oh.

She'd reached the edge of the forest. Behind her the birch and oak stretched to the horizon in both directions, although that wasn't what mattered. Not right now. What mattered was that the clearing she was stood in, perhaps twenty metres by ten, stopped very abruptly less than a dozen paces from her in a manner that screamed cliff, below which the roar of a shallow river could be heard. She turned to head back to the forests, but the bushes parted back at the treeline and the pigmen- a pack of the things, maybe a dozen- emerged from the undergrowth.

They were sprinting as they appeared, but cut their pace sharply when they saw she had nowhere to go from here. They edged forward, fanning out to prevent her escape with, Mira suddenly realised, surprising intelligence. Their eyes and mouths glowed the same phosphor-white as the wither skeleton's had when he gave them their current order, and they'd lost a good deal of their animalistic behaviour- their grunts and squeals were quieter and rarer, they stood more upright, and they didn't divert their glowing gazes from her for even the briefest moment.

One of them, the pigman closest to her, stepped forwards. It swung its sword up into a fencing grip from where it lay on the ground with a complexity of motion that she was surprised it could perform. It pointed the tip at her, opened its mouth and…

_The world flickered. Verdant forest replaced by hellish red landscape and back again instantly, hundreds of times a second. The fields of the damned stretched into the distance forever, suspended above an endless sea of lava. She was stood on the cliff… no, she was stood atop a tower of blood red stone, impossibly high. There was no pigman, instead there was a human, stood in the same pose and in the same place, the white light spilling from his eyes and mouth like a beacon. His clothes, the tattered rags which must have once been the turquoise shirt and blue breeches of the before, fluttered in a nonexistant wind, showing more of the great livid red scars that crossed his face and body when they revealed his torso and legs. Each time the flickering came, the hellscape stood for longer and longer, until the old world's influence was barely present at all, and she could feel the scorching heat of the…_

The pigman exploded.

Steaming offal flew in all directions and something that was probably a kidney struck Mira in the shoulder as the vision vanished like a deep nightmare- scarring but ultimately irrelevant. The other pigmen were thrown backwards by the blast that had killed their leader, scything fragments of bone cutting some down, but most just righted themselves, barely any worse for wear.

Something mottled green and flashing white leapt from the treecover and wrapped its four spindly legs around another pigman's torso. He lashed out with a meaty fist, but it was too late, and he followed his leader's cue as he was spread across the landscape. More creepers rushed from the undergrowth and charged the pigmen, but now they were prepared. Sword and fist met hide and claw, and it quickly became apparent that the undead were more than a match for the lizards they fought. For every bestial swordsman that became a rapidly-expanding cloud of undead tissue, four or more creepers lost their heads, although the sheer numbers of the alive combatants was making up for their deficiency in skill.

After a few scant moments a creeper broke through the line of pigmen. One of the undead soldiers turned to try and intercept it, but another creeper blocked it with a cannily placed claw. The first creeper, unaware of this, kept on its course towards the cliff unabated, and Mira felt its blood-red stalks of eyes staring into her own.

_No…_

She backed away fearfully, but all there was behind her was an abundance of massive drop to an uncertain fate. The creeper came at her without slowing and leapt for her, bringing its legs around at the last moment. She tried to duck, but had left it much too late- the scaly limbs wrapped around her torso and much of her diminutive body before the massively overbearing weight pushed her over the edge, an she fell screaming into the river below.

/

There was an impact. She wouldn't recall much, if any, of this later, I there was a later, but there as an impact, and the creeper's legs lessened their grip, releasing her into the blistering flow of the rapids. She was smashed between sharp rocks in a flurry of blue and white and grey and worrying red.

There was a sudden, massive pain in her arm, and she screamed beneath the water. It was broken, that much was obvious, and it drowned out the pain of her other forming cuts and bruises.

_Oh Light… I'm going to _die_ aren't I…_

At that exact moment her head struck a rock, and everything went black.

/


	6. Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

_And He looked upon the fourth._

_"You shall be Law." He said._

_"You shall seek to dictate."_

Coughing.

Coughing was a good start. It meant she was still alive. People probably didn't cough in heaven. Did people cough in heaven? Did angels even have lungs?

All this came in stuttering half-thoughts as Mira brought up what seemed like half of a river onto the sand below her. She turned herself over once her breathing had become somewhat more regular and spent a long moment laying there on the shore of wherever she was.

Everything hurt. Everything. Legs, arms, torso, face, she knew she'd lost a couple of teeth, her arm was still broken, she could feel blood running down her right temple…

But she was alive.

She realised how stupid this was. She was alive. She'd been hunted, attacked by a creeper, thrown off a cliff… she was twelve years old and she'd gone through hell in less than an hour, and she was still alive. She started laughing at the absurdity of it, laying on her back and laughing up at the stars as the water- pretty still feeling, must be a lake- lapped around her feet. She was lost, afraid, and in massive pain, but here and now she was alive.

She stood up, wincing as she did so and took stock of herself. Her smock was a total disaster, the sleeves and skirt torn to shreds. She'd lost her satchel too, somewhere in the forest before she'd fallen off the cliff, and with it she'd lost all her money, food, spare clothes…

And it was night now.

She was standing on the shore of a small lake, maybe a few hundred metres a side. Behind her oak forests stretched in both directions, until they circled around the lake completely. The only breaks in the treeline were as the rivers that fed into and out of the lake passed through the forest. The closest one, the river that flowed into the lake, was a fast-flowing torrent that was thrown between jagged rocks. It was tinged dark red with blood that flowed down from upstream, and Mira's thoughts were cast back to the creeper that had accompanied her on her plummet- it obviously hadn't made the trip as well as she did.

There was a loud crash muffled by distance somewhere in the forest, and she set out along the shore in the opposite direction, wincing with every step but not slowing her pace to accommodate her pain. There was another crash, the sound of a tree falling, somewhere, and this time it was a lot closer; she sped up her stride, still pinning her broken arm- her left one- to her side with her other hand. The crashes became louder and closer, and more frequent, but luckily still behind her. She started sprinting for the treeline, trying her best not to scream every time a foot hit the floor and she jolted her arm.

The sound of falling trees was getting even louder now, and she could hear other sounds with it- deep, resounding thuds as something huge struck the earth rapidly, as well as the thunder of dozens of smaller feet hitting the ground.

She was almost at the treeline when it emerged. It wouldn't have made a difference, but still.

She turned to look over her shoulder and instinctively threw herself to the floor as she saw an enormous… object sailing straight towards her. The tree flew over her prone form, the branches lashing her back ignored thanks to the renewed pain in her arm, and thundered into the forest before her, throwing up splinters of wood and great showers of earth as it came to a halt shattering and uprooting the oaks before it.

She stood up, shakily turning to face back where she had came. Far back along the beach was a horde of zombie and skeletons surrounding a core of pigmen, maybe a few hundred strong in total. In their mist was stood a titanic figure, six times the height of a man, an enormous hulk of rotting green flesh barely crammed into a titanic suit of off-white crystalline armour, and standing on his shoulder…

"Found you." The wither skeleton's eyes glowed white again. "Bring her to me. Do not kill her."

Mira turned and started to run again, but she had barely taken a step when a stabbing pain shot through her right knee from behind and sent her sprawling to the floor, yelling out in pain. She grit her teeth, struggling to get to her feet with only one leg working and one arm broken when another arrow went through her right hand. Her arm skidded out across the sand and she collapsed again.

_Not... gonna… stop… RUNNING!_

Something grabbed her around the throat and lifted her up and into the air. She started struggling in its grip, lashing out randomly with all four limbs, which had no effect on whoever was carrying her.

After a short while that felt like a lifetime- everything felt like a lifetime now, it hurt to breathe, it hurt to think- she was thrown a short distance back onto the sand. She coughed as sand got in her throat. Did angels cough? Wait, was that earlier?

Who's the guy in… thingy… black?

She looked up at the wither skeleton almost without comprehension. She could barely think. She was bleeding, a lot, and everything hurt, but it was hurting less now, and there was a nice big void to fall into, wasn't there? Look, right there. See the big white shiny light? It looked so warm and…

Words came to her ears, but they were too muffled to be understandable, not that she was in a state to understand them. Something about… a trick? But what…

There was a brief burst of hurt in her shoulder, followed by an equally-brief moment of wonderful warmth. And then…

It was said that death by withering is the most painful way to die. And it was. It truly was. It wasn't like having your brain roasted over the fires of hell, because your brain has few to no pain receptors, but it was like how having your brain roasted over the fires of hell should be. Like your central nervous system was being hotwired to work overtime. Like everything that could hurt, did hurt, as much as it possibly could.

And that was how Mira died.


	7. Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

_And as He turned to go, His gaze fell upon the fifth._

_"You shall be Last." He said._

_"You shall do as you see fit."_

The first thing she heard on waking the sound of cows from Amol's father's farm. There were worse things to wake to. A great many worse things, in fact. There was something fundamentally mundane about cows. No matter what crazy ethereal stuff passed through the world, cows were not one of them.

She half-opened her eyes, and quickly brought her left arm up to block the sunlight that was streaming in through her window. For a moment she expected the movement to hurt, and then wondered why she'd thought it would.

_Oh right, the dream_.

It was fading, even now she could barely remember any details. Something about… zombie pigmen? And landstriders? She'd been reading too much.

She sat up and hopped out of bed. She was stood in her old bedroom, with its walls of stone and wooden floorboards. Like the rest of the house it was sparsely decorated, but astonishingly clean, containing nothing more than a bed, a wardrobe, a small bedside table and a threadbare rug.

She stretched and yawned, and realised she must have slept in her clothes, because she was already wearing her green smock and brown leather boots.

_Wait, those boots were in the cupboard._

She took a step forward and her pink cloth shoes clacked lightly against the floorboards. She realised she must have been half-asleep, shrugged, and carried on out of her room.

She could smell breakfast cooking as she walked down the stairs. It smelled like… pumpkin pie.

_Wait, what? I'd never even heard of pumpkin pie until I reached the red triangle. _

She rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs to see her mother serving up oatmeal into dishes. There was no smell of pie anymore, and two of her brothers were already sat at the table, ready to eat. She shrugged and went to sit between them.

The one on the left, Nile, he of the black hair and cheeky grin, nodded to her as she sat down. "Hey Mi, sleep well?"

Mira smiled back, sighing. "Not bad. Forgot to get changed before bed, but still." She turned to her mother who was still serving breakfast. "Oatmeal and milk, hey?"

The woman smiled back warmly as she ladled the brown gloop into Mira's bowl. "Got to keep my brave little heroes full, haven't I, hey?"

Mira nodded back and dug into her breakfast with gusto. She looked out the window over the sink as her mother returned to it to wash up and saw that the sun was well into its journey skyward "Sorry I was late up, I guess I overslept." She grinned sheepishly. "I wasn't expecting Nile and Rylan to still be here to tell the truth, I would have thought they'd be out on the…"

A sudden, horrible feeling of foreboding came across her and she turned to her left, already knowing what her mother's reply would be. "What do you mean, hey? He's been at the forge since sun up." And indeed there was no one sat there. No bowls, no oatmeal, no Nile, no Ryan. No indication they'd been there at all.

_What… oh no. No. What's going…_

And at that moment, she remembered.

Her mother was dead. She'd died of a pox; nobody knew which one, just that the physician hadn't arrived from the next town in time. They'd lost her, and they'd mourned her, and they'd burned her in case something tried to bring her back. And then she'd decided…

_Oh, GODS…_

_It happened. It all happened. The skeleton, the zombies… but how…_

"You okay, sugarplum?" Sugarplum had always been her father's name for her, and surely enough when she looked up he was stood there, washing the dishes where her mother had been. But the ruse was up now, she scrambled to her feet, sending the chair clattering back, refusing to believe whatever was going on.

_I find a flaw and it fixes itself. Or maybe I fix it without thinking about it. Or maybe somebody else is out there, fixing it deliberately. But the flaws are too big now, too hard to ignore when they try to fix them. The cracks are being papered over, but soon the whole wall is going to fall apart because one of those cracks is MY GODSDAMN MOTHER!_

She pointed at her father with one accusatory finger. "If Nile is at the forge, you should be helping him! You'd never let him do it alone! THAT'S NOT WHO YOU ARE!"

As soon as the words left her mouth, he vanished from sight, a plate dropping from his non-existent hand to crash into the floor. She pointed at the shards now. "Why are the plates dirty? We had oatmeal for breakfast- who eats oatmeal from a plate?" the plates vanished like her father, without ceremony or sound.

"There should be a picture on that wall.

"The oven should still be on.

"Why isn't the window open?

She screamed, not a harsh screech of fear but a growling roar of utter fury, and the house shook violently, dust falling from the ceiling as the windows shattered and the furniture danced across the floor.

"WHY IS EVERYTHING WRONG?"

There was a creaking crunch as a rafter buckled, and then the whole house, the illusion, the mental construction, whatever, fell down around her ears. Tons of unreal stone, wood and mortar fell crunching to the ground in a huge heap, and she was buried for the briefest moment before she exploded out of it in a burst of indignation, rock and timber flying away like leaves in the wind.

She held her pose for a moment as she collected her thoughts.

_Okay. So, if I can do things like this, it must be something under my control. I don't have this kind of strength. Nobody does._

"Half right at least."

It had been her voice, but not her words- she hadn't spoken. She whirled around, searching for the speaker, and quickly found them. A diminutive figure wrapped in a deep black cloak, stood atop the highest point of the gently flaming rubble of what was once her illusion-house. She grit her teeth. "Get out. I don't need another… whatever everybody has been so far."

She caught the faintest impression of a grin on a rounded face beneath the hood of the cloak. "I'm not one of your illusions. Well, mostly. Nothing here is real, but I suppose I'm a little more real than everything else here. It's just the form that's a lie. Does that make sense?"

It didn't but Mira carried on with the conversation anyway- there would be time to make sense of the comment later. "This isn't real? Then who's lie is it?"

"Yours." The figure floated down from the rubble to stand before her, barely three metres away, still speaking in Mira's voice. "It's all in your head, constructed like a dream. That's why there are flaws." It kicked a pink-shoed foot at a smouldering piece of wood on the floor. "Take this rubble, for instance. Why is it on fire? There was only one naked flame in this entire house, in your stove. So shouldn't the fire either all be in the same place, or everywhere and an enormous inferno? But the only ruin you've ever seen was one destroyed by an explosives accident, and so to you rubble is a little bit on fire. This whole place is constructed like a dream, but your more direct presence means you see the problems more easily, which allows me to segue neatly into my next point.

"You're dead, or about to die, at least. Everybody does this, retreat to a safe place in their head when it… all gets too much. Maybe the tiniest fraction of a second has passed in the outside world. I'm sorry to tell you this."

_The skeleton... The sword… but if all that is going on out there, maybe I can access…_

"No." The hood shifted as the wearer shook its head, and there was the tiniest glimpse of blonde hair in the shadows. "You can't go back now. That's not how it wor-"

Mira screamed as she fell to the ground. It had hurt like nothing else, and it had lasted for what felt like an age in her increased state of perception. It had brought back all the memories from before as well, of the first moments of the withering taking over…

But it had worked.

The figure was taken aback for a moment, actually taking a step backward before it regained its composure. "My my… it seems you were a good choice after all."

Mira was struggling to her feet, clutching a piece of charred rafter for support. "…huh?"

The apparition ignored her. "Too bad it was pointless." It gestured over her shoulder. "See the horizon over there? The edge of the world? Doesn't it seem close."

Mira turned. The horizon was awfully close, just past the field beyond the closest one- maybe half a kilometre away- and something was rising from it, vanishing into the infinite sky as it ascended. On looking more closely, they were piece of sod, stone, and occasionally magma, chunks of the ground being torn away and flung into the aether.

And it was getting closer.

"What… what's that?" She took a reflexive step back, before turning on a hunch to see the same pieces of the ground rising on the far side of the village. "It's everywhere."

"That's the edge of your mind." The figure shrugged. "sort of. As you die your mind will fail to hold back the Jhavoor on the edges of your soul, and it will collapse inwards onto your core, until it forces you back into the cycle of birth and death." It took a deep breath. "Or at least, it would, if you had died any other way."

"What?" Mira had been left behind some way through the sentence. _Jhavoor, I've heard of that before…_

"I don't doubt you have, but that's not exactly important right now." The apparition reached out one small arm and tapped Mira in the centre of her chest. She felt a tightening of her breath, and a small plume of black smoke interlaced with floating onyx crystals rose from the point of the tap. "The withering is in your soul, you see. It can't be allowed to re-enter the cycle, and it can't be removed from you. You're going to die, and it'll be for good."

The figure turned to go as Mira's face fell, showing for the first time the red 'V' emblazoned across the back of its cloak. "The laws are the laws, I'm afraid. It was… good to meet you Mira. However brief the encounter was."

"No." Mira's response was utterly flat, without any trace of emotion, and if the creature was as smart as it thought it was, it would have been afraid.

The figure walked off, floating over any obstacles in its path. "I can only wish we'd met in better circumst_HURK!"_

It shot backwards as a rope sprung from the wreckage and wrapped around its neck, dragging it backwards arrow-fast and into Mira's waiting hand. Her fingers wrapped around its throat as she lifted it off its feet. "This… is… BULLSHIT!" She roared, lightning leaking in jagged busts from her mouth as the ground cracked around her feet and the creature struggled. "You're not a part of me. I don't know what you are, but you know things I could never understand. That means there's a reason you came here. That means… that means THERE'S STILL A WAY!" She tore off the creature's hood, looked confused at it for a moment, and threw it hard into the rubble. "I WILL NOT DIE HERE! IN A GODSDAMN FAKE OF MY OWN HOME!"

"The little girl who follows her dream…" She turned to the horizon across the fields, it was accelerating her way, and would be on her in a matter of seconds. "…she never dies, not in the stories."

"The stories aren't everything." The figure was stood again now, short blonde hair writhing in the growing gale. "They aren't true, for one thing. Team Adecision were murdering bastards, not freedom fighters. Ozone was a fool who pretended, not a metallurgist. The laws are true, the withering cannot be..."

"I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR LAWS!" Mira's arms tensed, down by her sides, and she screamed in agony as the withering smoke exploded out of her in all directions, chased out by a burst of blue-white lightning. The apparition recoiled in shock. "We make stories real, that's what people DO!"

_She actually purged the withering… She's __**modifying the laws**_!

The horizon was almost upon them, and now it could be seen that the chunks of earth were soaring upwards on the far side of a wall of translucent brackish light, barely perceptible even at this close distance. The wall of the Jhavoor was approaching them rapidly, ready to crush her soul back into wherever it went.

_I can do all this… stuff. Level a house with anger, break the ground with a roar, make lightning in myself… I have total control in this place because it's all in my head._

Mira formed both her hands into what she wouldn't recognize as guns, the index fingers extended and the rest of the hand bunched into a fist.

_Let's test the limits of that control._

The wall rushed up to her and she clasped her hands together and thrust the outstretched index fingers into the shimmering murky surface.

_STOP!_

Lightning burst from the impact points, growing in intensity and frequency as she was forced back by its inexorable advance.

_Is not slowing. Not even slightly. It's actually speeding up._

She was skidding backwards faster and faster, heading to some predetermined centre point in the encroaching cylinder of darkness.

_I need to give this everything. I'm going to die. I don't want to die, holy gods do I not want to die._

Electrical arcs blasted from her eyes and mouth as she put everything she had into holding back the wall. It had no effect.

_Wait…_

_I'm doing this wrong. I can't stop this… Jhavoor with pure force._

_The Jhavoor… I remember now, it's the basic building block of the universe, the raw material that the gods used to make the world. The landstriders use it too, sort of._

_ I wonder… I wonder if __**I **__can use it._

She extended the fingers on her right hand, pressed her palm against the wall, bunched a fist and drew it back. A glistening trail of dark stardust followed it backwards, connecting her hand to the wall. Acting purely on the most basic level of intuition she still possessed at this stage of mostly desperation, she grabbed her left arm around the elbow, feeling the brackish energy flowing down her arm and into her outstretched finger.

_You can stand up to me. But can you stand up to me, __**and**__ yourself?_

With a great screeching crash her finger punched through the field. It hurt beyond the wall, it burned like acid, but I was better than being in here.

_Guess not._

Lightning exploded around the digit one more, widening the hole until it was wide enough to step through. She grinned in triumph.

_The little girl after her dreams… she never dies._

She stepped through the hole.

***

The apparition stood up. it had been pushed along by the wall all the while, but had been able to mostly ignore the effects by floating above the ground. It noticed the field was still contracting, and frowned. It snapped its fingers, and they stopped instantly, not that it would matter if they hadn't.

It rolled the weariness out of its shoulders, and pulled the hood back over its face. A face that looked exactly like Mira's in every way, except for the pitch black eyes with their bloodred pupils, the eyes of a creeper, and the red 'V' emblazoned on its forehead.

It grinned in the fresh shadows. "I _did _choose well."

It vanished, and the world faded away.


	8. Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

_And so He left._

_And the gods began to build._

_Except he Last which did as it saw fit_

It was a large change, but a subtle one.

Across the world, across the plains, the tundras, the forests and the jungles, from city to city, town to town, village to village, the universe changed on some minute level. A grain of sand fell left instead of right, a root failed to grow, a neuron fired unwarranted… a thousand thousand tiny changes as the universe accommodated the changes to the rules.

And at the lakeside, before the hordes of undead, there was one very, _very_ big change.

Kahl looked out his window, surveying the inky black nightscape of the lands he nominally controlled. From the tundra in the west to the desert a fair way to the east… he was the only human for miles in every direction. Oh, sure there was a city maybe five days to the south and one day it would expand, but here and now he owned this land. He could take from it and give back that which he saw fit. He could build and tear down, hunt and farm, erect hulking monuments to nothing more than his own desire to construct, and then replace them before a mortal team would have even finished the first designs.

So why did it suddenly feel so pointless?

Yesterday, before the girl arrived… he checked his clock… alright, the day before yesterday he'd been as happy as he'd ever been. But now it was all like… like nothing he was doing mattered.

_Because unless someone else sees it you're wasting your time. Sure you could just appreciate the innate beauty or functionality of that which you make, but unless you see someone else benefit from your actions the payoff is negligible._

_You've had a taste of how it feels to be looked up to, for all that you've done to actually matter in a tangible way, and it's been yanked back from your face._

_Hell is not other people. Hell is wishing you had other people._

He sighed. "Gods damn it all." He turned to leave and froze when a bright white light cast his stark shadow over the wall.

"What… the hell?"

"I losst a lot of ssoldierss to that little trick you pulled on the cliff." Malokh hissed, raised his sword and brought it down hard into the girl's shoulder. She didn't even flinch, just grunted lightly as she fell to the ground. She grit her teeth involuntarily as the withering spread across her body- indeed, there was little conscious effort to her actions at this point, blood loss and the early effects of shock had pushed her mental faculties beyond any reach. She seemed to try and scream, but her lungs were desiccated husks by now, and no sound came out.  
In seconds she was a creaking ashen statue of formerly living flesh, now a blackened and dried crust over organ and bone-shaped clumps of dust that crumbled into a heap at his feet. He kicked at a few choice pieces, still intact against all odds.  
"Whatever you were, you are now dead."  
He looked to the closest of the pigmen, and he watched its face become illuminated with the light from his own eyes as the First Man took partial control. "It seems I sought, and I found. Prepare to-"  
Light, brilliant and blue-white spilled from behind him. A crack of thunder like colliding planets came a split second later, and he felt himself being thrown forwards. He spun in midair, thrusting his sword into the sand to slow himself. Glass vitrified into sand around the impact point as the rest of the horde sailed past him. None of them possessed his acrobatic skill, and so they hit the sand and the surrounding trees hard. Many of them wouldn't be getting back up again.  
He turned to where the blast had come from to see a titanic pillar of blue-white light maybe a dozen metres across spearing down from the sky. Lightning crackled along its length, sparking off at random across the beach.  
That was where the girl washed up earlier, but...  
_What?_  
On his right, at the end of a long furrow of obliterated trees and churned earth, the giant was pulling himself to his enormous feet. His nether quartz armour was scorched and cracked, and he'd lost most of the flesh from his right arm. He bellowed a roar that would be deafening to anyone who possessed the eardrums Malokh lacked and charged at the pillar of light, crouching low as he approached like he was going to tackle it to the ground.  
Suddenly the pillar vanished with another, smaller thunderclap, and was replaced with a single diminutive figure, crouched where its base had formerly been.  
_That'ss, that'ss the... oh dear..._  
The giant stumbled, unsure at this turn of events, and that was its first mistake. The figure jumped to its feet and thrust out its fist, punching clean through the giant's crystalline greaves like they weren't even there. The giant roared in frustration, swiping down at the vague blur of its tiny opponent, which was its second mistake. It felt a pressure around its forefinger, and then...  
_What.  
_The giant went sailing overhead, easily several tons of rotting flesh and bone crashing down into the centre of the lake where it sank from sight.  
Malokh slashed his sword in the direction of the newcomer. "Kill her!"  
The horde surged forward, a hundred biting jaws, two hundred grasping arms, one single purpose.

Mira didn't know the word 'uncanny', but it was perfect to describe her situation. Instead, weird would have to suffice. This was... Weird. Very, very weird.  
The world appeared as through a thin layer of smoked glass, especially at the edges of her vision. Sounds were muffled and distorted, echoing in her altered perception, and her vision blurred with slight afterimages when she moved her head. The world was discoloured, tinted slightly green, although it also seemed to be getting bluer. Everything stank of ozone.

But that was nothing compared to how she _felt._

The best comparison was an urge to vomit- as if she was possessed by some compulsion to let out a building… something, but in a good way- if she didn't want to let it out, she could wait. A bizarre warmth spread through her core and limbs, and felt like it was nucleating at random throughout her body. She felt stronger than she ever had before, like she could run up a mountain, like she could _lift_ a mountain.

Mira turned from the lake to face the horde and smiled an open-mouthed grin, feeling the tang of lightning crackling between her teeth. She brought her right arm up in a crook, fist clenched, and brought her left hand down onto her bicep in the way children in her village had done before they fought.

Her voice crackled and roared. "COME ON THEN!"

The first zombie took a fist through the face before she kicked it hard in the chest. Electricity sparked off both impact points as the monster flew backwards, colliding with the creatures following it. She ducked under a wild sword swing before bringing her elbow up into a pigman's chin- it sailed out of sight, snout and skull pulverised. Something tried to bite her and he swiped her hand through it sideways. It fell into two pieces, lightning bristling off the faces of the cut.

Another sword came at her neck and she grabbed it by the blade, wrenching the golden weapon from its wielder's hands. The sword was chained to the pigman's wrist, and so his whole forearm came away with it, and then she was hacking and slashing her way through the horde with no more skill than a child with a stick, but it didn't matter. Arrows and teeth broke on her skin, swords shattered and undead flesh blazed where it was struck by the lightning that coruscated around her, that streamed from her mouth and eyes in great white-blue trails.

The next few moments were a blur of blood and thunder until she turned to find the next monster and realised there was only the wither skeleton left.

Malokh's eyes glowed once again. "My, my. I did find, after all."

"You found a grave." Mira growled, still spitting static. "Who are you?"

"Someone so far beyond your comprehension that the very act of speaking to you is degrading to me beyond belief."

The surface of the lake parted and the giant rose from the depths, water cascading from its crystalline armour. It remained unacknowledged by the girl and the skeleton until the former raised one hand in a fist, index finger extended. A column of blue-white light perhaps a metre across exploded from the digit, striking the giant square in the chest. It fell back into the water with a huge cavity in its torso, the edges of which glowed cherry-red.

Neither of the figures on the shore averted their gazes from each other, even for a second.

A long moment passed, as the skeleton appeared to reconsider his statement. "Alright.

"Once there was one. Then there were five. Then there was me." The skeleton thrust his sword into the ground to hold it and stood, arms by his sides, palms facing forwards. The world began to flicker again, just as it had on top of the cliff, but this time the other place was different. They were still atop the tower, but now there was life, or unlife, other than the man in the tattered clothes. Great black creatures, as tall as the wither skeleton but three times as broad at their widest point, flitted through the air, their sinuous reptilian bodies writhing as they circled the tower. Each had three necks, each topped by an oversized human skull of bleached white that leaked grey fire from the eyesockets and mouth.

There were hundreds of them. A swarm of the greatest of hell's creatures.

The scarred man opened his mouth, speaking in a deep rumble like an earthquake, or the first tremblings of a volcano. Even as she was now it made Mira feel sick to the base of her stomach. "and soon, there will ONLY be me."

The creatures surged down as a flock, a swarm of night-black aberrations, screeching fit to shake the ground. Mira turned and fired off a pair of the beams that had dispatched the giant at the swarm, and for a moment the murky nether-world shone white-blue.

The man in tatters laughed. "Not even close."

One of the creatures struck her from th blinding light, scorch marks replete across its surface but still very much alive. Its central head bit her hard on the left shoulder as the left and right heads drew back on their serpentine necks. The skeletal mouths opened and a torrent of grey witherfire sprung from between their bleached teeth.

Mira screamed as the flames washed over her- it hurt like withering had before, like a direct wiring to her nerve endings had been overcharged. She grabbed it around the central neck as hard as she could.

"We are outta here!"

The girl and the monster vanished from the tower.

/

The thunderclap sounded across the clear sky, and heads turned skyward from Pythir to Zerek to see the comet that streaked across the night's firmament. Two tails streaked behind it, one blue-white that crackled with lightning, the other a sickly grey fire, swirling amongst each other as it passed overhead. Occasionally the grey tail would dominate, occasionally the lightning would gain the upper hand.

And from Pythir to Zerek, people went back to what they were doing. That was Landstrider shit right there.

/

Mira punched and kicked and bit and grabbed like a mad girl, desperately trying to get an upper hand over her opponent as they blazed through the air. She'd never been trained to fight, the closest were the wrestling matches with the boys in the village, and was just lashing out with every bit of instinct and habit that she had. Jaws clamped around her arm and she swung at its general area, feeling her fist connect with polished skull and glance off upward.

She kicked upwards, channelling all of whatever the hell it was she was using into the foot, and felt it sinking into the Wither Lord's stomach with a flash of lightning. It screeched and replied with two mouths full of grey fire that burned like flaming acid.

They brawled as an incandescent cloud of fire and thunder that passed through the sky faster than any man could travel, their progress marked by rumbling blasts of sound, waves of force that churned the clouds and now began to strip the leaves from trees as they passed lower. Sandstorms swirled and the grass was pulled from the ground by the wind of their passage.

Until, eventually, they had to hit the ground.

By either sheer chance or artifice of one or both participants they landed by the lake in which the giant had died. The impact was comparable to that of a meteor. Trees were destroyed for hundreds of metres around. Fires sprung into existence in the wreckage, but thy were smothered by the spray of water as the shockwave threw most of it from the lake. The ground cratered nd cracked and the combatants scored a deep furrow in the ground asthey came to a rest, still kicking and punching and clawing at one another.

The monster lunged at the girl and she ducked under its mouths, grabbing it by the tail and hurling it away. It soaredinto the air, but quickly arrested its progress and turned to face its opponent. All three skeletal jaws opened and a torrent of fire rose from three throats, surging down as a vast pillar of flame. Mira countered it with her own lances of lightning. The beams connected between the pair and produced a cataclysmic explosion that bowled both fighters over.

_This isn't doing anything. _

_But I have no idea what _will _work._

_I'm finding new Landstrider skills every minute._

_And the best part? I have NO IDEA why. _

She crouched and leapt at the still airborne wither, shooting off in a stream of blue-white lightning. It surged towards her in kind, and they met at the midway point. Their heads butted as her hands grabbed its peripheral skulls by their eyesockets and both fighters tried to force the other back.

_ I don't know what I can do. What I'm capable of. That jump? Out of nowhere._

_And right now I'm flying. So there's that_

_Hang on._

Fire started to brew in the mouths of the wither. It would be a titanic blast this time, and she had no counter.

_But to get back here… I _teleported.

A new torrent of flame, a more vivid, ugly grey than any preceding it, surged from the wither's three mouths. Its target vanished in the inferno, and it considered that maybe it had already won.

"Nope."

Mira slammed both fists downwards into the wither's horizontal back as hard as she could with all the… whatever it was that she could muster. Sparks exploded from the impact point and the wither plummeted downwards, trailing flames and a deafening roar. It struck the abused earth like a meteor, breaking through the ground with a thunderous crunch and she pursued it with a flurry of punches and kicks that drove it into the ground.

_Okay, so the Jhavoor was in the dream? I doubt I used it all up back then._

She soared back up into the sky and held her left hand in a fist. A small sparkling of brackish stardust formed around her hand.

_Going to need more than that._

She thought back to the dream, the vision, the post-death experience, whatever. There would be Jhavoor left there, right? And it was in her head all along, yeah? So if she could find the place, go back to it for even the briefest moment…

_Wreckage and fire and mistrust and a vanishing world._

_Oh yeah._

Another ball of Jhavoor formed around her right hand. She grinned and brought both hands together over her head.

_Alright, building block of the universe? Let's see what we can build._

The wither emerged from the ground with a burst of stone and assorted rubbles, but by now it was too late. It looked up and, for the briefest moment, got to observe the twenty metre square base of the pillar of black crystal that was hurtling towards it at minorly subsonic speeds.

What it never got to appreciate was the fact that the pillar was over one hundred metres tall.

And it was accelerating.

What Kahl found was a sleeping girl on the bank of what he knew used to be a lake, surrounded by what was presumably once a forest before it was destroyed.

There was also a very, very deep crater in the ground. He came back and filled it in several months later.


	9. Chapter 8- End Book One

CHAPTER EIGHT

_And so the universe began its spiral towards now._

_And the thing came from beyond, drawn by the moulding Jhavoor,_

_The Black Dragon,_

_-And thus ends pregenesis._

(A note is scrawled in the margins of the page. "_The original text says balorin. Balori is singular, balorin is _plural_. The correct translation would be "things"- what was the second?"-Dr Rorte, Pythir Academy._)

The first thing she heard on waking the sound of cows from the farm. There were worse things to wake to. A great many worse things, in fact. There was something fundamentally mundane about cows. No matter what crazy ethereal stuff passed through the world, cows were not one of them.

Mira sat up, and immediately regretted the action. Everything ached, and if it didn't ache it was sore or scorched. She was lying on a featherdown mattress in a large oak room-Kahl's house- murky with only the twilight that was coming through the windows to illuminate it. She smiled- she had no idea what had happened, but she was somewhere safe.

"It won't be easy."

Kahl was seated at the table, toying with a small pile of odd red dust that sparkled wrongly in the half-light.

"It's never easy for anyone. It's years and years of hard work, getting up at dawn and collapsing into your bed long after sunset, and I can't guarantee it will even have a payoff. You have no natural talent, you haven't Dreamt, and you failed every test." He took a deep breath. "You will either succeed, drop out, or die, and from what I've seen you won't let yourself drop out.

"But I'll do my part. I'll teach you, if you'll let yourself be taught. The failure won't be on me. You'll be my… apprentice I suppose. I'll teach you to fight and craft and smelt and mine and farm and if you're very, VERY lucky you'll have the Dream, and we can start learning properly.

"So, what do you say?"

Mira nodded. "I… Thank you, thank you so much."

"Good choice. Now get up and go harvest the wheat from the farm. You still have another twenty minutes of light left. You can get it done in fifteen if you work hard."

"Okay!" Mira pulled herself out of bed and made for the door. She was about to close it behind her when a thought struck her. "Kahl… Master…"

"We can go with boss. Boss would be fine."

"Boss… what happened last night?"

The red dust vanished into Kahl's palm. "What do you remember?"

"I… was being chased by zombies, and then there was a river…" she scratched her head absentmindedly. "I remember lightning. A storm, I think. Maybe."

"Interesting." Her new master replied. "I don't know what happened myself. Probably one of them phenomenoms. They happen."

"Huh…" she made to leave again. "Oh, by the way my scar's gone."

"What?"

"My burn scar." She showed him her left palm, it was perfectly unblemished apart from a minor graze. "Must have been the potion earlier, huh?"

"Yeah." He lied. "Something like that. Oh, by the way, did they have many mirrors where you come from?"

She shook her head. "We had one. Mum kept it in a locked box. Why?"

He sighed internally. Thank fifth for small mercies. "No reason. Now go do the wheat."

The door closed behind her as he sat back in the chair. He let his thoughts cast out, searching for one particular mind. There was his own crystalline green ball with a black core, there were the humans in pythir, various themes on the concept of spheroids of various colours and patterns. There were the shadowy, intangible minds of spiders, the slow, half-broken minds of zombies and skeletons, and the blazing, crackling ruby/orange of creepers. Cows and sheep and had small, lethargic thoughts, and chickens were hyperactive to the point of insanity, whilst pigs were much closer to humans than he felt comfortable admitting.

Eventually he found what he wanted- a stark emerald cube with a deep onyx interior, surrounded by minds of a similar shape.

_We need to talk. A… her eyes have…_

**Kahl, what are you talking about?**

_…_

**That's not any help.**

_When can I come see you? We need to face to face._

**You still tier 3?**

_I don't need to fly. Besides, I enjoy the challenge of life._

**Fine. Drop in when you want. What's wrong with whoever's eyes?**

_They're blue._

**That's normal for humans.**

_They used to be brown._

**… that's not so normal.**

He withdrew his mind, pulling back over the vast space at the speed of thought, touching briefly on everything that passed. As he reached his house he decided to check on his new apprentice's thoughts. Just on a surface level- he couldn't read minds, and she couldn't broadcast.

There was a sphere of crackling white-blue thunder, broiling and turning but… happy. Maybe. It was hard to tell.

Wait beneath that.

There was… okay there wasn't anything. He could have sworn he'd felt a burst of… orange, maybe? Or red? Or black?

Huh.

Either way, he returned back to his own mind. He stood up, working his neck to attempt to remove the headache that telepathy always caused.

It was going to be a challenge, that was for sure. But hey, how hard could it be?

The sun set on the first day of the rest of both of their lives.


End file.
